Chen Ting-fei

Chen Ting-fei's political capital comes almost entirely from Tainan. Elected to the Tainan City Council in 1998 at just 23, she entered the Legislative Yuan in 2008 and has held her seat ever since; she also sits on the DPP's Central Standing Committee and is one of the pan-green camp's most recognizable faces in Tainan. Her road to the mayor's office has been a winding one: in the party primary for the 2018 mayoral election she lost to Huang Wei-che, who went on to win the mayoralty, and this time she narrowly beat fellow DPP legislator Lin Chun-hsien by 2.69 percentage points in the January 2026 primary, after which Lin quickly pledged his full support. Her opponent is Hsieh Lung-chieh, a KMT at-large legislator and chair of the party's Tainan chapter. The two have run against each other five times since the 1998 Tainan City Council election, she has won a seat every time, and in 2012 and 2016 she defeated Hsieh head-to-head in legislative races, which makes this their sixth contest. Tainan is a long-held DPP stronghold and the place where President Lai Ching-te launched his political career, so the race is often read in terms of the pan-green base; she leads in most published polls, by margins that shift with survey methods. The bigger test for her is to rally the party again after a close-fought primary and to convince residents that a veteran lawmaker is ready to take charge of Tainan's city government.